Table of Contents

Using the Epic Testbed

The Epic Testbed contains an Epic chip and an Ethernet to serial bridge. It can be setup to create a link that makes the Epic connect to a serial port on your computer as if it was connected by a USB cable.

There is a good but slightly outdated guide to this from NESL at UCLA. Thomas also has a guide here. The steps here are an updated version of those.

The driver for the ethernet adapter on the testbed is super out of date. This makes it pretty much impossible (we haven't found a way to do it) to run it on new versions of Ubuntu. At this point you need a virtual machine and an old version of ubuntu. To make this easier we have a .iso file in shed-big.

Do it the old way

The first step is to make the testbed connect to a serial port on your computer.

To do this we need to install the Digi Connect ME driver. The packages from Digi are outdated but a .deb that works with at least Ubuntu 10.04 is available here and here. That will install the necessary drivers on your machine.

Install TinyOS Apps on the Node

You can now install TinyOS apps on the remote nodes using the serial port. However, this becomes cumbersome with a lot of remote nodes. There is also a issue with the Digi RTS lines. From the NESL wiki:

Note that the Digi Connect have some nasty problem with the RTS lines. If you connect to their serial port, then the RTS line gets pulled down. This will result in the epic module on the Quanto Testbed Mote to go into RESET, and thus stops running. The only solution to solve this problem so far is to force the RTS line to stay high, by reconfiguring the Digi module, and then reconfiguring it before programming.

A nice way to take care of both of these issues is to use Thomas Schmid's Managed No[t|d]e Interface. This makes it much easier to handle the issue of the RTS lines and of programming multiple nodes.

Now copy your config.ini to the folder of the TinyOS app. If you don't need a different config.ini for each application, try modifying install_quanto.py by changing the option parsing and MNI instantiation section to